Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net writes:
On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
if you're not familiar with or don't clearly understand the difference, look up the history behind why the Debian Team renamed firefox to "iceweasel".
here you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_...
That was nothing to do with copyright, nor attribution.
The problem is the way that Mozilla enforces its trademark.
Mozilla is (fairly reasonably) concerned that people might take one of it's trademarked programs, trojan it, and redistribute the result under the name of e.g. Firefox, thus tainting their good name. They therefore reserve the right to specify which code costitutes Firefox, etc. and want sight of any patches that are applied to allow them to determine whether they should withdraw the use of the name from the result of the patch.
Debian on the other hand wants to be able to apply security patches without needing to ask Mozilla for approval, and more importantly perhaps want not to impose such restrictions on their downstreams.
The use of the Ice* names is done to avoid the scenario where a security fix fails to meet with approval, and then the Debian maintainers being faced with the need to do an emergency trademark purge in order to deploy a security fix.
Cheers, Phil.